Troublesome Country

By James Hufferd

Americans agree overwhelmingly with and take vigorous pride in a limited number of familiar, cogent propositions inherited from our Revolutionary/founding era that perennially characterize the idea base defining our country and comprising the tenets of the unofficial American national creed often referred to. Troublesome Country presents an unflinching evaluation of America’s history witnessing a generation after generation stupendous failure to practice our sterling ideals. Instead, we have routinely done the opposite. This challenging measuring-standard book contends that the cure for our now-conspicuous national decay lies in our citizens en masse beginning to deliberately live up to our vociferously-professed ideals, and seriously holding to account our governing bodies and institutions as well, to truly serve and represent our deeply-held ideals. Defined in shorthand, these de facto tenets of our national creed are: popular rule (democracy), freedom, equality, justice, and independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Hufferd
• Release date: Mar 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476276014

James Hufferd

James Hufferd (born in Iowa, 1946), attended public schools and grew up in a small farming environment. He earned a Bachelor's degree in History at Iowa State University, a Master's in International Studies at University of Wyoming, and a Ph.D. in Geography at University of Minnesota (1979). He has taught in elementary schools (including an isolated one-room rural school in eastern Nevada) and numerous universities, and has traveled and researched in 19 countries, including the Canadian Eastern and High Arctic and various parts of Brazil. Fluent in Portuguese, James Hufferd was twice a Research Associate in Residence at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. In addition to "The Bells of Autumn," a Western historical novel, James Hufferd has written and published (2005) in two volumes the first narrative history of Brazil published in English since 1819, entitled "Cruzeiro do Sul, A History of Brazil’s Half-Millennium." His 2011 historical novel, "The Bells of Autumn," is an exploration of white-Indian relations in the American West as well as a portrayal of the early legacy of a section of the northern Great Plains. James Hufferd is also the author of "The Majoritarian Solution," a very early assessment of American corporatism (1985), "Homeland: A Comedy," a satiric novel to be available in December, 2011, and "Troublesome Country," a historical/political essay to be published in late winter, 2012. He is particularly interested in the political economy and history of the U.S. and the international/global New World Order, and is currently completing a novel entitled "Evil Vanquished! The Extraordinary Rendition of the Bilderberg." JLH: 11/11

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Troublesome Country

by

James Hufferd

Copyright © 2012 James Hufferd

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TROUBLESOME COUNTRY:

Let’s Live Up to America’s Creed For Man Cannot Long Live by Bunk & Bombs Alone

by James Hufferd

…To everyone

Contents

The American Creed

Part 1: The Greatest Creed on Earth – Ours!

Part 2: A.B.C.: America Before the Creed – Colonial Times to 1776

Part 3: The Revolutionary Generation – 1776-1800

Part 4: Breaking the Bonds and Picking Up Steam – 1800-1820s

Part 5: Breaking Sweat – 1830-1850s

Part 6: Breaking and Taping the Idols – 1860-1898

Part 7: Shattering the Idols – 1898-1919

Part 8: Clashing With Demons – 1920-1945

Part 9: Running Ahead – 1945-1967

Part 10: Boomers Come of Age – 1968-1992

Part 11: Millennials & Millennarians – 1993-2012

Part 12: Starting Today – We Begin to Personify Our Creed

About the Author

THE AMERICAN CREED

I, as an American, believe that the direction of our government on all matters should be freely determined by the people, in accordance with the people’s will. I believe that the government cannot legitimately control the people’s behavior, at least as long as we do not intentionally harm each other or, in our common free perception, unduly endanger ourselves. I believe that our laws should be applied to us all equally. I believe that the pursuit of justice is not merely an option, but a mandate, and is to be served by uniform due process. I believe that the American people as individuals as well as the American nation, being richly endowed, should live largely independently. And I demand that all due measures be undertaken to fully and perpetually achieve these reasonable conditions and ends, and that all contrary measures be ceased.

(Signed) ____________________

Part 1: The Greatest Creed on Earth – Ours!

Does a nation have a purpose? One that defines its life, distilled into a strongly held, deeply felt consensus creed informing and guiding its highest aspirations, at least purporting to shape its thrust of action across centuries? Does America subscribe to the defining creed necessarily attending such a purpose? I believe that in our mind and our rhetoric it clearly does. Our creed, I submit, consists of five inseparable sentiments instilled by our education and assumed unquestionably and proudly by the overwhelming majority of us as our nation’s highest ideals. These sentiments or doctrines we commonly deem more than worth living and fighting for. Our creed’s components are as follows:

Freedom to control the government. This is the idea that the direction of the government should be freely determined by the people.

Freedom from government control. This is the idea that the government cannot legitimately control the people’s behavior at least as long as we do not harm others or, in our common free perception, endanger ourselves.

All men (all humans) are created equal. This is the idea that our laws be applied to us all equally.

Liberty and justice for all. This is the idea that justice is not merely an option, but a mandate, and is to be served by uniform due process.

Personal as well as national independence. The American people, being richly advantaged by nature, should live largely independently.

Throughout all the many generations that have successively refined and established America’s compact five-fold purpose expressed in the American creed since its inception, a kaleidoscope of circumstances have shaped, defined and tested all of the facets of the core, or nuclear, national mind. At each and every turn, the challenges confronting and developing our purpose have been unrelentingly stern from quarters and sources that coveted exclusively for themselves the nation’s sovereignty and benefits.

Those unstinting, exclusively selfish interests have emerged victorious to an unnerving, and at times almost total, extent. Thus have strong concentrations of power sought without stint, repeatedly, to strip away and claim the mantle of sovereignty bequeathed to all of the people, as stipulated in the ideals of the heartfelt creed, basic to our Constitution – as the chapters ahead reveal.

The successful outcome of the struggle that needs yet to be joined strongly for clear national sovereignty, even now usurped by overwhelmingly powerful combinations, is increasingly in doubt.

Hence, the generation now emerging is faced with the murky challenge of recovering our promised birthright. For the benefit of us all, let them see the way clearly in order to redeem our loss of universally beneficial purpose and fulfill the creed, so heartily evoked by Lincoln’s "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Because, all parts of that most inspired formula will have to be redeemed to recover the nation we cherish.

Some may object that we don’t even have an official American creed. That’s true. But although we do not have an official language in the U.S., English is our national language, spoken and written more or less well by almost all of us. And just so, we do have what clearly amounts to a national creed – and it is at least basically as I have laid it out here.

And others may object that we need to add tenets to our creed. For instance, "Competition." Ready to operationalize it for all, fair and free? Then let’s level the field! And could there be additional tenets that would be enthusiastically embraced by virtually all Americans? Then list away!

And so, if we can assume our creedal list is fairly accurate, the relevant question becomes how have we done, generation by generation, at implementing this nearly universally agreed-upon creed we Americans have in effect hewn for ourselves and passed down? How strong have been our positive thrusts, so defined? And how strong and threatening or destructive have been our narrower-interest push-backs? In so many words: how can we realistically rate ourselves before the world in the vaunted category of proven character?

And in what if any part or parts do we actually excel? And in what parts do we still have a wealth of determined work and care to invest in order to live up to our ambitious and quite special social contract, in order to in fact present before the world the exceptional reality we are so proud to endlessly boast of?

Thank heaven our history is not yet over! Let us first see how we have done so far. In the chapters ahead, we will air and discuss a curious, infuriating, and intolerable fact – shockingly, we will find a nearly unbroken, centuries-long record – even in sketchy and incomplete form – of what amounts to uniform denial, betrayal, and evasion of all of the principles we say we believe in and that this country was founded on and emphatically and loudly claims to represent. That pattern of forsaking our sworn ideals in practice is apparently broken, it turns out, only by an occasional notable and heroic exception briefly and bravely upholding those cherished principles, the very tenets of our national creed and soul of what we mean by America and American.

The most encouraging gains and victories in this regard we can cite – and there are, of course, many over the years – all end up literally getting lost and overwhelmed among all the accumulating stinging nettles and worse continuing to crop up around them. So, despite every advantage, our record is, in fact, inexcusably dismal. And if we, as individuals, haven’t grossly betrayed America’s beloved creed (our most cherished ideals and principles) ourselves, we’ve stood by. So, it must be asked, would honesty and courage in facing up to that disheartening record of betrayal of self and mankind mean one hates his (her) country? Use your God-given brain!

It may be that we’re now, effectively, to the point where even reading this book will constitute an act of courage. But, take its message in from some source and take it to heart, America must! In truth, to succeed as a nation, we must acknowledge our stunningly thorough betrayal and subversion of our very foundational creed of resolved beliefs, and we must turn that betrayal around, by resolving to put into effect the principles of our own sacrosanct making and affirmation – what we say we stand for.

Let the shrinking violets and cowards and the incorrigible cynics look away. True Americans must do something! Seriously rededicate and fiercely adhere anew, and the rot that troubles us so and that drags us down will die! (And if we don’t so adhere and renew, it will most likely be our demise in these accelerating, brutal days – or, at very least, our equally tragic metamorphosis into something else.

So, starting today, renounce and don’t tolerate our and our leaders’ schizoid, ‘end justifies the means’ excuses. And, from this day forward, live as one re-united people – personify – America’s unmatched creed! That is our solution, the solution the vast majority of us long for!

Part 2: A.B.C.: America Before the Creed – Colonial Times to 1776

The creed did not come to America early.

Perhaps everyone knows by now, however vaguely, that Christopher Columbus was not by a long shot the first far-traveler to reach America. The Indians, of course, came first of all by far, as far as we know.

But then, they had it relatively easy, we hasten to remind ourselves, because they are thought to have come dry-shod overland in the far north, which didn’t require too much grey matter, just a steady and determined plodding, one foot ahead of the other – surely no great feat. And of course, we can’t forget that the Spanish conquerors of Mexico in the sixteenth century showed so little regard for signs of non-European intelligence that they endeavored to destroy every Native American (Mayan) book they could get their hands on.

That the Vikings came early seems almost by accident, accomplished merely by following the closely aligned stepping stones of the Arctic across, only looking for something to plunder and a little grass for their livestock and fields to grow a few stalks of hearty grain. And they probably didn’t stay very long. Of course, the Vikings were Europeans so they did have, we can rest assured, at least some brainpower and synapse or two of imagination inside those helmets. So goes our usual thinking.

Early arrivals by others – mainly European – are recorded in passing or just rumored. So they don’t concern anybody very much but a few scholars seeking to justify their own existence by spying or scying inscriptions or scratches, or whatever they are, on relics, dredging up stories long and probably as well forgotten, and for good enough reason, so the thinking goes. A cloud of deniability shrouds the lot of them, although some perhaps might rest at least lightly on bedrock of fact.

But when the claims, well-anchored in evidence or not, point to a full-fledged earlier non-European crossing or discovery, our literati seem to grow just a bit uneasy, not to say unglued exactly, immediately imputing cults and baseless legends for the claims before thoroughly processing the evidence, be whatever it may.

Thus, the claims of a retired Brit sea captain named Gavin Menzies in recent years to have traced the progress of a Chinese imperial fleet around the earth on a 1421 voyage, leaving tiny colonies and traces, have fared less than well with the pros.¹

An interesting and charming follow-up volume to Menzies’s was produced by a Canadian architect, claiming to have discovered evidence of one of these Chinese globe-trotting expedition’s settlements, on a hilltop on his native Cape Breton Island.

Evidence cited includes some enticing perceived parallels between aspects of the unique culture of the region’s Mic-maq Indians and that of Chinese minority peoples. But this author’s claims (like Menzies’s) didn’t cut it at all with the professional archaeologists, who only belatedly and, it seems, reluctantly checked out the hilltop site.²

Meanwhile, the scenario put forward by Guyanese writer Ivan Van Sertima, among others, over the course of several volumes and years, that West Africans had crossed the Atlantic to Central America repeatedly far earlier in reed vessels, may or not have been accurate.

There apparently is, though, evidence in pre-Columbian Meso-American plastic art, painstakingly collected by German noble Alexander Von Wuthenau over many years, that black Africans were not unknown in the region. Meanwhile, Van Sertima’s claims have met with near unanimous dismissal and ridicule a priori. The shaping of the New World, it appears, must be left exclusively to Aryans.³

A negatively influencing strain of nineteenth century thought known as Aryanism infects much of our history and provides the textual background for the blatantly bigoted white supremacy movement.

And the Indians, who we have to concede came earlier, didn’t achieve very much by way of advances or lasting influences, especially north of Mexico, it is often openly or tacitly agreed. When the Vikings landed and at least briefly settled on the North American coast, two full generations before William the Conqueror invaded England, they were looking for hardy grazing and crop land, and seem to have been beset by the Skraelings (Indians and, to the north, Inuit), who evidently didn’t want them around for some reason. They left absolutely no legacy, it appears, unless the gene for blue eyes, reportedly passed down in a couple of instances.

But Columbus wasn’t even next, all evidence indicates. Yet the question remains unresolved: If not Columbus, then who was? Madoc, the noble Welshman? Brendan, the Irish mariner/cleric? Some taciturn fisher-folk from Bristol? Or perhaps someone even more unidentifiable?

The point is that no one before Columbus managed to set off quite the endless chain of publicity, pugnacity, positioning, pseudo-piety, presumption, profiteering, plunder, pleasure-seeking or parochial self-congratulation that he did. It’s been enough to have rocked and revolutionized both the New World and the Old non-stop ever since, keeping us all perpetually on the brink of interminable chaos and yearning for peace.

What was it that Columbus sought? Gold and Asian spices for his Italian food – because he fully intended to be – and just assumed the whole time he was hereabouts, finding America, that he was in Asia.

Van Sertima, the champion of African pre- Columbian crossing and activity in America, tells us that his theory, regardless of its merits or the evidence, suffered from scholars’ almost-universal revulsion at the thought that flat-nosed Africans could cross the mighty ocean before the ’discoverer’ Columbus, a man blessed with expert geographical knowledge and navigational skills, who was so blessed indeed that he believed at first be had stumbled on the backside of India, that Cuba was the continent, South America an island, and the Caribbean See [sic] the Gulf of the Ganges.⁴

The Portuguese knew how to sail to Asia, and did. Columbus’s own colony, among the Tainos on the north side of Santo Domingo, lasted barely five years. Five years of hell for the Tainos.⁵

But, his gold fever became permanently established in the European bloodstream and mariners spent the next two-plus centuries trying to find their way through and around the impenetrable, infernal thicket of banal dullness – ordinary virgin land – that stood in the way to get on to the real prize, Asia. Thus, Columbus it was who started the whole picture-show following a long series of insubstantial and meaningless flits and flickers in the dark at the start.

As far as the five factors or tenets we have identified as making up the American creed, all given at least lip service almost universally today, there was no evident sign of any of them as yet. No seeds were planted that could have led to them in the soil of the New World, and mentally and culturally, none of the forefathers of their development had ever even left Europe, or probably anywhere else they eventually might have come from, in this whole long, young, restless and now remote period.

A curious but not irrelevant side note is that, following the consequential discovery of the New World by a man who was apparently Italian sailing for Spain and the arrival of another Italian, Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) sailing for England in the late fifteenth century, there were no permanent English settlements (forerunners of the vast later Anglo-American empire) planted in the New World for over a century –